In the current digital world, a person may have many electronic devices and many online accounts, each of which may be protected or secured by different security credentials. Devices may include mobile phones, pagers, computers, electronic book reader devices, navigation devices, and many other devices having data communications capabilities and computer or computer-like functionality. User or service accounts may include bank online accounts, credit card online accounts, mortgage online accounts, web-based email accounts, social network accounts, and so forth.
Security credentials for a particular device or account may comprise one or more of a username, password, security phrase, and other security factors.
It is increasingly common for electronic devices such as mentioned above to rely upon user accounts as support for core functionality of the devices. For example, a tablet computer may rely upon an account with a telecommunications provider for its ability to communicate over the Internet. As another example, a book reader device or other personal media device may rely upon an online account to obtain books or other media for consumption on the media device. The association between the device and an account of the user is often created by the user during an initialization or configuration process, in which the user provides security credentials for an account that has been previously created.